Ramen Shop - A review of the film
Bowls of Memory: Ramen, Grief, and the Comfort of December
Snuggled up under my duvet, feeling somewhat nostalgic and just tired of the rollercoaster year we collectively survived, I decided to end my last Substack essay with a film review exploring…can you guess? food! Actually, ramen in particular… One of my ultimate favourites has been Jūzō Itami’s Tampopo (1985), which follows the transformation of a widowed noodle shop owner struggling to sustain her small ramen restaurant on the outskirts of Tokyo. Tampopo, played by Miyamoto Nobuko (who is also Itami’s wife), encounters Goro, a wandering truck driver whose cowboy attire and itinerant masculinity position him as both outsider and guide. But I am not going to review Tampopo. Instead, I will be writing about Ramen Shop (2018), directed by Eric Khoo, unfolding the quiet assurance of a meal prepared for someone you love. Yes love. Because what is the best way to show care and compassion if it isn’t through cooking?
The film follows Masato, a young Japanese chef who travels to Singapore after his father’s death in search of the mother he never knew and the culinary lineage that binds him to both places. His journey is carried not by plot twists but by gestures of care, by searching for answers, by shared recipes, and by conversations that arrive slowly, like a broth that has been simmering long before we enter the kitchen. Food becomes a medium for grief, remembrance and healing, a way to approach what cannot be spoken directly. Ramen in this film is not simply sustenance or craft but a vessel for ancestry, loss, and reconciliation. Each bowl holds the residue of migration and the ache of histories shaped by war, separation, and silence. I don’t think I ever felt so hungry and sad watching a movie, yet it was the perfect movie to watch in this in-between time after Christmas and before the New Year.
The emotional architecture and framework of Ramen Shop is built around absence. The father is gone, the mother is unknown, and what remains is a longing that seeks form through taste. Khoo situates this longing within the intimate spaces of kitchens and dining tables, allowing memory to surface through sensory detail. There is a deliberate, gentle attention to process as we, as viewers, watch hands chop, stir, and serve. These actions are not decorative but ethical. They insist that care is a practice learned over time and often inherited without words. In this sense, cooking becomes a language Masato must relearn in order to mourn and to belong. The Singaporean context expands the narrative beyond the personal, reminding us that foodways are always entangled with colonial histories, diasporic movement, and the uneven intimacies of cultural exchange.
Placed alongside Tampopo by Jūzō Itami, Ramen Shop reveals both kinship and contrast. Tampopo is exuberant, anarchic, and deeply postmodern in its structure. It breaks open the ramen narrative through vignettes that eroticise, parody, and politicise eating across Japanese society. Itami treats ramen as a democratic obsession, a site where masculinity, discipline, and pleasure collide. The film’s humour is sharp and often absurd, but beneath it lies a serious inquiry into how bodies are trained to consume and perform. Ramen Shop, by contrast, is restrained and elegiac. Where Tampopo multiplies stories, Khoo narrows his focus. Where Itami celebrates excess and spectacle, Khoo leans into restraint and reflection. Both films understand ramen as more than food, yet they ask different questions. Tampopo asks how we eat and who teaches us to desire. Ramen Shop asks what we carry with us when those teachers are gone.
Watching Ramen Shop at the end of December, at the close of the year, heightened its emotional resonance. This is a season thick with retrospection, when time seems to pool rather than flow. Even though it is a time we might spend with family and loved ones, it is also a time we remember loss and grieve. We take stock, often involuntarily, of what has been lost and what remains unresolved. The end of the year invites rituals of comfort, not as indulgence but as survival. We return to soups, stews, and slow-cooked dishes because they promise continuity in a moment that feels otherwise fragmented. I know I have. Ramen, with its warmth and depth, becomes emblematic of this desire. It offers a form of holding. In Khoo’s film, the bowl of ramen is an archive. It contains family stories interrupted by history and revived through care. In December, this gesture feels collective. Many of us find ourselves craving foods that tether us to earlier versions of ourselves, to kitchens we no longer enter, to people we can no longer feed or be fed by.
Ramen Shop does not resolve grief so much as it teaches us how to sit with it. Its quietness is its strength. The film resists the catharsis often demanded by narratives of loss and instead offers something closer to companionship. Tampopo ends in laughter and appetite, a celebration of life’s messiness. Ramen Shop ends in understanding, fragile and hard-won. Together, they frame ramen as a cinematic language capable of holding contradiction. It can be playful and mournful, communal and solitary. At the end of the year, when we are collectively negotiating endings and continuities, Ramen Shop feels less like a film to watch and more like a meal to return to. It reminds us that comfort food is not about nostalgia alone but about the labour of care that allows memory to be shared rather than merely endured.
I gave Ramen Shop 4 stars and a like on Letterboxd. What did you watch this holiday season? I hope you are cooking something nourishing and doing little else.
With love and light until 2026,
Huma